The Film Stage

“The id grows tedious,” art critic Jackson Arn wrote recently, “when left to speak too freely.” The Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude keeps his in check by grounding flourishes in pure mundanity. Near the end of Kontinental ’25, an ex-professor, Orsolya (Eszter...

Spike Lee’s major year already kicked off in a big way at the Super Bowl with a tie-in to one of his most underappreciated films and now the filmmaker is finishing his first narrative feature in five years ahead of...

Claire Denis, set to turn 79 this year, has not slowed in the least. As cameras roll on Cry of the Guards she’s entered negotiations to direct The Soap Maker, an update-of-sorts of Mauro Bolognini’s 1977 horror feature Gran Bollito,...

After co-helming Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman, we’ve long anticipated Duke Johnson’s next feature The Actor. A decade since the filmmaker’s last film, the drama is finally set for a release from NEON, and it’s much sooner than expected. The André...

Positive or not, all critical appraisals of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s films inevitably land on the same talking point: their inordinate cinephilia. Rightly so: the Belgian duo’s filmography––an oeuvre now spanning four features and a handful of shorts––teems with...

It was just last week we published an interview with the great Charles Burnett, whose 1999 drama The Annihilation of Fish was finally resurrected and is now rolling out in theaters. This spring, Kino Lorber will now give another one...

After working with such directors as Werner Herzog, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Guillermo del Toro, Rian Johnson, Jeff Nichols, and many more, Michael Shannon embarked on his directorial debut a few years ago. Eric LaRue, scripted by Brett Neveu based...

After being one of the biggest Sundance breakout stories in the last few years, Talk to Me filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou quickly embarked on their next feature. Sally Hawkins, who opted out of the latest Paddington, is ready for some visceral...

As horrifying images and videos of Israel’s forced displacement and ethnic-cleansing in Gaza, now supported with even more tenacity on the part of the United States regime, become the principal media representation of Palestinian lives, the importance of showing a...

Through the story of the religious leader Papá Liborio, Nino Martínez Sosa’s 2021 film Liborio deftly contends with the cultural, spiritual, and political forces of a colonized Dominican Republic. After establishing a Black, self-sufficient community in the rural hills of...